I was born a Texan and, after twenty-two years of boots, beans, and beef,
I moved to California.

My first job in California was developing the interface for KEE, an
object-oriented development environment, for IntelliCorp, one of the first
artificial intelligence companies founded during the AI boom of the early 80s.
When I arrived at IntelliCorp in the summer of 1984 I had never seen a window or
a mouse (remember the Mac had only been released six months before). The job of
user interface development was assigned to me more by random chance than any
special design but it suited me and I learned quickly. I spent the next seven
years building graphical user interfaces for IntelliCorp and hanging out with
the Slugs, a loose group of low energy folk with good senses of humor.

After a brief stop at Silicon Graphics, I moved to Kaleida Labs
where I worked on the development of ScriptX, an object-oriented,
multimedia programming language. My principle area of responsibility was
the design and development of classes for the representation of time,
media synchronization, and movie playback. By that time my interest in games
had been rekindled so I spent most of my spare time while at Kaleida
collecting and playing games. The rest of it was spent hanging out
with various Evils, Fuzzies, Vegans, and the occasional Slug.

Unfortunately, Kaleida Labs was rolled back into Apple, one of its parent
companies, when Apple and IBM decided to cut back on costs at their
two spinoffs, Kaleida and Taligent. Most of the team decided not to
move into Apple, though a few stalwarts joined up and fought the good
fight right up until Apple's last jolt. Now I believe they've all
moved on to other enterprises.

I spent a bit of time trying my feet at independent consulting and
even participated in a small startup doing Web consulting for a time.
You may have seen bits and pieces of my handiwork here and there on the Web.
The hectic lifestyle put a crimp in the time I had to play games and
maintain this Cabinet (I even missed one issue!). It had to stop!

Finally, I came to rest at a small startup named ClickOver. Over the course
of my stay, we grew from five guys in a livery stable to thirty plus
folks. I worked on the internals to a specialized Web server written in 100%
pure Java, preserving the buzzword purity of my on-going career. The startup
lifestyle was still hectic and I missed several more issues along the way
but the experience was certainly interesting.

I left ClickOver, which by that time had changed its name to AdKnowledge,
to take a bit of a break. I slept. I read. I travelled to England, France,
Italy, and Germany (the last bit with Mike Siggins). I was away for months
and had a great time.

Late that year, some old friends from IntelliCorp called me in to perform
technical due diligence on a small startup they were thinking of financing.
I liked the idea and signed up to lead engineering at the nascent BitDynamics.
It was fun, interesting, and the wildest ride yet. Along the way the name
changed to Clip2 and the staff grew from four to just past thirty, once again.
Many of you may recall the Game Cabinet experiments on BitDynamics/Clip2's
bookmark technology. Or perhaps not! In any case, it never quite caught on
and, hurried on by other developments, I left there, as well.

My first child, young Kipling Tidwell, was born in the late Summer just
before I left Clip2. In the late Fall, CMGi purchased AdKnowledge for
an outrageous sum of money. So, with money in my pocket and a youngster
growing up ever so fast, I decided it was time for another long break.
A particularly long gap in Game Cabinet issues falls into the Clip2 era
and the ensuing break. Sorry, folks. Life calls and you gotta answer.

I took advantage of the time during my break to learn more about the
process of founding and funding new ventures. I attended more
seminars, presentations, conferences, and panel sessions during that
year and half than I had in the entirety of the rest of my career!

Along the way I met the good folks at
The Enterprise Network (TEN),
a new venture incubator closely associated with NASA. They persuaded me
to serve as an Advisor in Residence, which basicly meant that I made
my experience and connections available to the companies hosted at the
incubator. I must have done something right as I was named a TEN Fellow
in April, 2001. I also serve on the board of advisors for three of the
companies at the incubator:
inkChaser,
Dynago, and
BlueBox.

I also indulged in a bit of angel investing. The most prominent of those
companies was Bluelark. If you are
a Palm user you may know their product as the
Blazer
web browser offered by Handspring. The Bluelark engineering team did
an amazing job of building a product that I use every day. And the biz team
successfully sold the company to Handspring in December, 2000. Good work
all around!

In August, 2001, I joined ArcSight
to help out with their server architecture. Can't say much about what we're
up to right now but watch this space.

Games were a frequent family activity while I was growing up.
Over the years we amassed quite a collection but our favorites were
Risk, Backgammon, and an endless procession of card games.
My interest in board games continued through the late 70s but after
Cosmic Encounter came out my attention wandered (I even missed the
other Eon games, for shame). I spent the next seven or eight years game
mastering various role playing games. It was a grand way to waste time but
the older I got the harder it got to find folks that could still suspend
their disbelief for a few hours of silliness.

In 1990, I married Jocelyn
Becker, the famous travel author (wink). By a happy coincidence
after we were married we discovered that we both liked playing
board games. It started out with Pente and Cosmic
Encounter but quickly spread to the American editions of the
Ravensburger games. But the real epiphany came when we wandered into
Just Games (a venerable venue near London's Picadilly Circus that
has since passed on to that great remainders shelf in the sky) in November
of 1991 and discovered the full range of European games and
Sumo all in the same afternoon.

My in-laws live in London and Oxford, which happen to be the sites of two
very nice games stores (coincidence?), so my collection has grown at an
alarming rate. We've also managed to interest many of our friends in these
new board games so there is no shortage of playmates.

Finally, in the summer of 1994, the Game Cabinet opened for business on
the World Wide Web. Originally, the Cabinet was stocked with articles I
had written for Sumo or
The Game Report supplemented with
articles gleaned from the Net. The readership continues to grow each
month. Back in September, 1994, there were around 300 loyal Game Cabinet
readers. By September, 1995, there appeared to be somewhere around seven
hundred serious readers (some folks download upwards of one hundred
articles each month!), about as many casual readers, and an even larger
number that peek in occasionally. By September, 1996, readership had
grown to somewhere around 5,000 regular readers and the Cabinet was receiving
over 15,000 visits per month (where a visit is defined as a series of requests
from a single IP address with each request occurring within 15 minutes of
the previous request - whew! We tend to log 6 or 7 hits for each visit -
some folks download more pages, some less.). As of September, 1997, the
Cabinet logs 40,000 visits per month and I just don't like to think about
how many readers that frighteningly large number represents. And you can be
sure they each mail me individualy when an issue is late! Finally, after no
updates for one year, in early September, 2000, the Cabinet was still
getting 45,000 visits each month. Yowza. And two years on after the Cabinet
all but fell silent, in August, 2001, it has dropped off to only 70,000
visits per month.
That's right - its still going up! Who said the Web was dead?

Have fun, look around, drop me a line if you have something to say,
notice a problem, or just like what you see.